


you were so just, looking across the sky (a ficlet collection)

by ratherembarrassing



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 14:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10192037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratherembarrassing/pseuds/ratherembarrassing
Summary: a dumping ground for ficlets posted over on tumblr





	1. Chapter 1

The bar feels different without Kara.

The waitress delivers her drink silently, sets it on the coaster with a quiet thunk, disappears. Her name is Micha, she has two children, and she came to Earth from a planet whose name Lena cannot pronounce. Her children are seven and nine, and Liam plays soccer and Cole is good at math, and Lena knows all of this because Micha told Kara while Lena sat beside her.

Kara radiates a heat that draws Lena in against her will; she thinks she sat opposite Kara in a booth the first time Kara brought her here, but if she did it was the only time.

She’s never been here without Kara before, and the bar feels different tonight.

Halfway through her drink, an alien beer that is blue and tastes like cinnamon, her seat dips, and she expects to see Kara when she looks up, but instead it is Alex, dressed all in black and dripping with rain.

“You’re not a very difficult person to track down.”

“I wasn’t trying to be difficult.”

It’s the absolute truth. She’s never trying to be difficult. But, she knows, she very often is.

Alex doesn’t say anything. She reaches across, takes a drink from Lena’s half empty glass and drips water onto Lena’s skirt. It’s silk, because she’s still dressed for work, because she went straight from work to Kara’s apartment, and then, after, she came straight here to this place she’s never been without Kara.

“This is revolting,” Alex says, setting the glass back down. “You know that right?”

Alex, she has worked out, is terrible at small talk, and she appreciates the effort even if it’s unnecessary. “I like it,” she answers anyway.

“And you didn’t need to run out.” Alex pushes the glass away from them both. “You’re allowed to be angry at Kara for what she did.”

She doesn’t believe Alex. Anger was not an emotion allowed in the Luthor household. Anger was a waste of energy, a distracting emotion that got in the way of fixing things that were wrong.

But Kara wasn’t wrong.

She can sit in this booth in their bar and look at it objectively, and come to the rational conclusion that Kara wasn’t wrong. Which means it’s Lena who is the one who is wrong. To want, with the strength of the heat radiating from Kara’s very being, so badly that she would rather Kara chose the safe option, the version of events where other people die and Lena doesn’t have to watch on the evening news as the life is very nearly strangled from her girlfriend.

“Hey,” Alex says, her hand damp against Lena’s skin, fingers curling around Lena’s bicep. “You are. Kara is— she’s reckless and headstrong, she runs into things without thinking she needs a plan, never mind what that plan should be, and one day it’s going to get her into trouble.”

Behind her eyelids, Lena can see it over and over and over again, the way Kara had fallen from the sky, cape snapping angrily as gravity got the better of her.

“It’s infuriating,” Alex says, voice as tight as Lena feels.

Kara lands on the roof of a warehouse with a sound that Lena never actually heard on the television, and the sob she’s been swallowing down breaks free.

It bows her back, curls her in around herself as it claws at her throat, and Alex catches her. “And it’s why we love her.”

If this is supposed to be making her feel better, Alex Danvers has a lot to learn. If anger was an impermissible emotion, to speak of love was an unspeakable offense. Love was a tool to be wielded like a blade. It was never safe.

And perhaps that is why she’s crying in a bar; Lena does not feel safe, not by a long shot. But she does feel love. And she’s wrong and she’s angry but still, she does feel that love throbbing through her veins.

When she’s done, her face damp and her body tired, Alex is still curled around her, and Lena is mortified. “Sorry,” she says, trying to shift away. “I don’t usually—”

“Perhaps you should.” Alex lets her go, but not fully. “I would know, loving Kara is a lot of work.”

And it’s embarrassing, having someone say it like that—a bald-faced statement of fact. But she cannot refute the truth of it, and she can feel the skin beneath her fallen tears burn.

Alex chuckles, tugs on her arm as she slides out of the booth until they’re both outside. It’s raining just outside the tiny awning, and they huddle together. “Come on,” Alex says, arm curling around Lena’s shoulders. “Let’s go yell at Kara.”


	2. Chapter 2

The magazine is delivered by courier, a courtesy Lena wasn’t expecting in this day and age. But CatCo is, her admittedly snide comments to Kara notwithstanding, a publication of high regard. Cat Grant has seen that a certain standard is maintained and her departure hasn’t affected that yet.

Her day is already wall to wall with appointments, and she sets the magazine aside with the pile of correspondence that, as Jess has been reminding her all morning, she needs to decide on, respond to, or engage lawyers to address. She’s in no hurry to see what shade of tar Ms Danvers has chosen to feather her with. 

By lunchtime it is still there, glossy pages beneath a bowl of leafy salad that she doesn’t feel like eating but will remain until she does, much like the magazine. 

She might as well get it over with.

Lena hates the perfume scented pages, her nose itching as she flips to page 34. The photo is her L-Corp portrait, taken only a handful of weeks ago. She looks tired, and she probably was. The whole thing is ridiculous, that she was even interviewed is infuriating for reasons she can’t quite press her finger to, and she skims over the words on the page, skipping paragraphs that don’t seem important, jumping about until she realizes she’s looking for something that isn’t there.

It’s not about Lena, or about alien rights. It’s about L-Corp and its technology division, and what the device will do but not by whom it might be done, which is a question to be dealt with but not right now.

The piece is fair.

Not for one moment does she think this is the first draft from Kara’s hand. Every shift in thought and feeling runs right across her face, and Lena would have to have been blind to miss the genuine anger beneath Kara’s stuttered defence of freedom and liberty and The American Way. But she had set that aside to write this measured, benign little piece of reporting. And that is interesting.

“Jess,” she calls out, piercing a slice of cucumber with her fork. “Let Kara Danvers know I’d like to see her.”

Lena likes things that are interesting.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part of #hugs4lena2k17

“Hey.” The sound startles her; Lena thought she was alone. “Sorry.”

Kara. Of course.

“It’s okay,” she says, not turning away from the blanket of lights beneath them. “You didn’t have to stop by, you know. I’m–”

“If you say you’re fine,” Kara interrupts, moving into her orbit, not touching but near. Close. “I’m going to be mad.”

“Well,” she starts to say, her throat tight around the sound. It’s been a long day and a longer night. “We wouldn’t want that.”

The heat of Kara’s closeness is stronger now, and she’s so focused on that she misses Kara moving, fingers catching at her shoulder and turning her into Kara, closer and closer until she’s surrounded by Kara, her arms and warmth and strength wrapping around her until Lena can tilt her head into the wool of Kara’s coat.

“You really wouldn’t,” Kara says against her hair, hugging her impossibly closer. Lena doesn’t know what to do with her arms, hanging limp at her sides, and she raises them helplessly until her fingers graze Kara’s shirt, the material tight against the muscles of Kara’s back.

No, Lena thinks, she would like Kara mad. She would like Kara any way she can get her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part of #hugs4lena2k17

“Lena?”

With the sound of footsteps comes Kara’s shoes appearing under the stall door.

“I know you’re in here.”

And she wonders at that, how Kara can say something like that with absolute certainty, but it’s trampled by the thought of tucking her legs up so Kara can’t see her feet under the door, and then she has a vague memory of that scene in one of the _Scream_ movies, where the killer hides in the stall like that, and it’s terrifying, thinking something is there and then it’s not and—. That’s irrelevant. She won’t do that to Kara.

Her feet stay planted on the worn tiles of the courthouse bathroom floor.

“Lena, I know you’re in there. And if you don’t want to come out, that’s okay.”

Which is good, because she’s going to stay in here until she’s ready to leave.

When Lena arrived that morning, dressed for a funeral with shoes that pinched to match, she’d marches to the front of the courtroom without meeting a single set of eyes on the way. It wasn’t until her mother’s lawyer had come to speak to her that she noticed Kara, corralled with the rest of the press at the back of the room, watching her carefully.

Not that the rest of the room wasn’t watching her, but Kara’s gaze didn’t feel vulturous.

Far from it, and Lena had turned sharply away. It wasn’t the time to accept even the softest offers of sympathy. Though it may have helped, that small fortification, when her mother had shouted as the jury read the verdict, horrible, rancid words thrown at Lena with unerring maliciousness. The crowd around her had erupted, but the words were inescapable. No one had ever had such power to injure Lena as Lillian, and now Lillian had no cause to restrain herself.

In the fracas, Lena fled. It wasn’t the first time she’d hid from her mother in a bathroom.

She didn’t think anyone had followed, didn’t think anyone would bother, though she had forgotten Kara was there.

“But if you don’t come out,” Kara says, voice pitched just loudly enough for Lena to hear her, and Lena can picture her standing on the other side of the door, head bowed and fingers twisted together, “then I can’t give you a hug. And I— I think you could probably really do with a hug right now.”

Could she? It’s not something she’s allowed herself to want in longer than she can remember. Would the gnawing hole in her gut, the unhealable wound caused by Lillian’s hatred, of the world, of aliens, of Lena herself, be even briefly salved by Kara’s arms around her?

Lena doesn’t know, doesn’t really believe it will either, but the memory of Kara’s eyes on her has her standing, shoes quiet on the tiles, to nudge the lock open.

“Hi—” Kara says, and she’s surprised, probably didn’t think Lena would actually come out. Lena’s surprised too, but then Kara makes good on her offer, pulls Lena out of the stall by her wrist, and just Kara’s fingers against her pulse threads a warmth through limbs she hadn’t noticed were cold. “I’m sorry, if you wanted to be alone—”

She’s saying these things even as she’s dragging Lena in, arms threading round Lena’s shoulders, and oh, Kara is so, so warm, and Lena shakes her head, because Lena didn’t _want_ anything, but, what was it Kara had said? Lena could do with a hug? If that’s the same thing as needing it, with a potency that leaves her dizzy, then yeah. She could do with this hug.


End file.
